Saturday, July 6, 2013

We're back on our weekend schedule with a fresh helping of our favorite links to other blogs, web sites, images, and articles, gathered each week from the Twitterverse.
• Seeing history: the rise of spectacles in early modern Britian (plus a 17th c. prosthetic eye!)
• Fishscales in a c.1805 staircase by John Nash at Attingham Park.
• Great collection of images of 16th c. chopines, 20" tall platform shoes worn by courtesans & nobles.
• Those fashionable fellows of the 1770s, the Macaronis.
• It's July, 1813, and Lady Caroline Lamb stabs herself over Lord Byron at a party.
• A magnificent souvenir, c 1800-25: a parure to remember.
• The Battle of Gettysburg foretold by a NY clairvoyant and by a Quakeress with a gift of prophecy.
• The art of bathing in Renaissance England.
• Free online course for reading medieval handwriting.
• Faces of the American Revolution: poignant 19th c. photos of the last veterans.
• The opening of the new London Bridge, 1831.
• The Great Gatsbymansions: real-life homes that inspired the book and film.
• What secrets did Queen Charlotte keep inside this beautiful diamond-studded pocket notebook, 1765?
• Bear's grease, bellows, bonnets, biscuits, and Bibles: essential goods sold to Europeans in Bengal, 1851.
• The stonemasons who are keeping Lincoln Cathedral alive.
• The angel of Gettysburg: Elizabeth Thorn, 1863.
• The pointy-stick proliferation, or, how to explore the antiquities of Britain as an 18th c. gentleman.
• Misbehaving Pilgrims: miscellaneous sexual offenses 1653-1683 in the Plymouth Colony Court records.
• 149 years ago today the Confederate army was...buying office supplies.
• Postcard: Edith Wharton writes to Henry James from Italy, 1911.
• America's long (and odd) fascination with yoga.
• Mrs. Perry's 1810 recipe for Volatile Foetid Spirit, to be taken when "low, faint, or helpless, or any way nervous."
• A single gilded picture frame held successively the portrait of the king of Great Britain & the first president of the United States.
• The art of begetting handsome children, 1860.
• Wonderful on-line slide-show of 150 years of Irish crochet lace.
• NYC's lost Metropolitan Hotel: hosting 10,000 guests for the Tom Thumb wedding reception, 1863.
• Macedoine and other eccentric Victorian jellies.Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for daily updates!

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comments:

I don't know if I've ever told you how much I enjoy the Breakfast Links...very much! Lots and lots!I always think there are one or two links that look VERY interesting, and it always turns out to be more like ALL of them!

Thanks to Isabella/Susan and Loretta for the link to Elizabeth Thorn's story and the Gettysburg Prophecies!Where to start today? So many wonderful things. The John Nash fishscale restoration, the last Revolutionary veterans, the King George/George Washington frame--you couldn't make up that kind of story, and Lincoln Cathedral--one of the most beautiful in England. I enjoyed the "Handsome Children" post very much, but the language: "When the husband cometh into his wife’s chamber, he must entertain her with all kinds of dalliance, wanton behaviour, and allurements to venery" really suggests that this was a much much older advice book--perhaps even Jacobean?--reprinted in the Victorian era. Definitely not Victorian vocabulary.

Thanks for doing this on a weekly basis, you have a gift for extracting cool stuff from the internet :) Also as a longtime Calcuttan, I am vastly amused by that list of goods the British seemed to find essential to survive in Bengal.

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A Polite Explanation

There’s a big difference in how we use history. But we’re equally nuts about it. To us, the everyday details of life in the past are things to talk about, ponder, make fun of -- much in the way normal people talk about their favorite reality show.

We talk about who’s wearing what and who’s sleeping with whom. We try to sort out rumor or myth from fact. We thought there must be at least three other people out there who think history’s fascinating and fun, too. This blog is for them.